I love music, and I love festivals

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

One of the weird things about being in a band is that I very rarely hear any new music. Because I’m working 9 to 5, rehearsals and gigs take up most evenings, so I hardly ever get to watch any bands.

My friend Matt decided to have his stag weekend at All Tomorrow’s Parties vs Pitchfork, at Camber Sands, so I got a note to let me out of band practice, and joined 23 other lads to terrorize the bowlie kids. We had a cracking time. I didn’t see that many bands, what with the venue being indoors on the hottest weekend for ages. And the fact that we were mostly drinking at the chalets, and playing a weird Norwegian stick game (which we kept winning – although we didn’t understand the rules, so we may have been cheating).

The first night, Matt was persuaded to wear a Chewbacca costume (although he didn’t take too much persuading), and the next night someone produced a pink panther suit for him. The picture gives you a flavour of what happened when the singer of Les Savy Fav spotted it – there are more pictures on flickr

In amongst all the carnage, I learned a few things this weekend:

1. lots of bands are full of men with beards
2. lots of bands have swearwords in their names
3. lots of bands have multiple drummers
4. the keyboard player from The Hold Steady looks suspiciously like Super Mario






5. ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon is coming back into fashion for some reason, possibly connected with the success of Vampire Weekend
6. “if you shove a pink panther suit on a bearded fat man, you just can’t go wrong”
7. I have a new keyboard hero, Joel Robinow of the fantastic Howlin Rain
8. you can have a lot of fun drinking tequila from seashells
9. you can have a lot of fun playing the drinking game we invented.
   

here are the rules:

1. take several bottles of clear spirits, such as vodka, gin, tequila, sambucca, plus some water
   
2. pour some of each into a selection of shot glasses, while the players aren’t looking
   
3. ask each player to pick a number, then they have to drink the shot down in one without sniffing it first
   

I’m not sure what to make of all this, but I thought I’d share it with you.

Malcolm


p.s. hello and thank you to everyone I met and talked nonsense to, especially Stuart, Marc the ironing board surfer, and Mike from Howlin Rain

Barcelona! Such a beautiful horizon

Monday, May 5th, 2008

We’ve been working hard on demos of the new songs, but we managed to get out into the sunshine this weekend, with a gig in Barcelona. Despite being on stage at 3.15 am, and the boys heading down to the beach afterwards with a bottle of rum to watch the sun rise, we got in a bit of sightseeing and some of us got a little bit burned.

The gig at Razzmatazz was great – a packed room singing along and reminding us why we spend a whole day travelling to play for 45 minutes. The only bad thing was that between songs we could hear the banging beats from Timo Maas playing upstairs.

We stayed in Barcelona an extra night and got a bit more sunshine, before flying back to Gatwick to be welcomed by the rain. Hopefully the weather will improve in time for the summer festivals…

Malcolm